Joey's Here

When the owner of a company that manufactures among other things robots is killed by one. Murray asks Houston to help his friend, the designer who was at odds with the man because he was ...
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When the owner of a company that manufactures among other things robots is killed by one. Murray asks Houston to help his friend, the designer who was at odds with the man because he was planning to shut his project down. And among the suspects are the man's brother who was battling him for control and an unscrupulous businessman whom Houston knows who was in the building at the time of the incident. Written by
rcs0411@yahoo.com

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Electronics company CEO Richard Hoyt (Monte Markham) is set to be overthrown by his brother Willie Hoyt (Troy Donahue) in a proxy fight. Willie wants to shut down a costly development project of the company called "Joey's World" a life-size Video game with robots named Joey. One of the robots picks up a loaded .38 and pumps Willie full of lead.

John Gordon Boyd (David Cassidy) the erratic genius who designed and programmed the robots and created Joey's World is the obvious suspect though plenty of others have motive. Herman Burnham (Norman Fell) a competitor of Hoyt's and a man who Houston has dealt with personally and come to despise is one of the suspects.

My general criticism of the series tended to be the windows through which Houston found himself in these investigations. Here he has multiple ones where in a lot of episodes he had no believable ones. Here Houston's accountant Murray (George Wyner) ropes him into investigating, not because Houston has a stake in the company nor because Herman Burnham, a man Houston loathes is accused either of which would have made sense.

Here Murray has a stake in the company via a children's charity connected with it and "hires" Houston but the real client is John Gordon. Pretty convoluted when they could have just made Houston a Hoyt Electronics stockholder.

The cheap "Lost In Space" style set for Joey's World is comically low-grade but other than that this is still a pretty fun episode compared with the others in the first season of this show, The killing of Willie Hoyt was actually filmed like the iconic shooting in the "Who Shot JR?" episode of Dallas in a clear homage. If one is going to hire Troy Donahue to appear in a murder mystery in a whodunit like this it is rather wise to make him the victim. He gets whacked at the beginning so we are spared his bad acting in the rest of the episode.

It is odd that Houston or C.J. were not investigated for serial killing of washed up old TV stars since on his show an enormous critical mass of them got whacked over the course of its history.

This show gave work to a lot of former stars from old TV shows. The cast here is filled with them, You also might recognize Paul Petersen - Jeff Stone from the Donna Reed Show playing one of the uniformed security guards.

H.B. Haggerty who played Tiger-Man the bodyguard for Princess Ardala portrayed by Pamela Hensley on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century appears here as Herman Burnham's bodyguard. Even this early in the series they were casting actors who had worked with the series stars before. George Wyner who played Murray on this show also worked with Lee Horsley on Nero Wolfe.

It is a very small group of people that make movies and TV in Hollywood and people who have worked well together in the past like to do so over and over again where and when they can. Hollywood is more than just a very exclusive club. It is a collection of exclusive clubs that get more and more exclusive depending on how successful people are. Sometimes actors just work with the same people simply because they share an agent.

Paul Brinegar and Dennis Fimple who played Houston's comic relief ranch-hands Lamar and Bo are credited as having been in this episode but they are only seen in the opening montage.

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